Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Exceptionless error management, take 2

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@gmail.com>]

On Feb 11, 2008, at 7:53 AM, David Teller <David.Teller@univ- 
orleans.fr> wrote:

> I'm not sure where you see approach 2.

I'm probably the one being confusing here. My only point is: the  
monadic interface seems unlikely to work well, and so it seems to me  
like a bad idea to make compromises to the simplicity and terseness of  
the approach for the potential of making an efficient monadic  
implementation later.

In short, I would use the status type directly and eliminate the  
may_fail

Y

> My suggestion deals with approach 1, while Daniel's is approach 3. The
> point of monads is not related to converting exceptions, but rather to
> being able to compose functions without having to add a manual check  
> at
> each step. And the point of this "optimized" monad implementation is
> just to make that faster.
>
> If the confusion is caused by my answer to your previous post, I just
> realized that my fixing your "bind" was a mistake. Please accept my
> apologies, I misread what you had written.
>
> Now, if this candidate is too confusing -- which I can't judge, as I
> wrote it -- perhaps something less confusing would be more  
> appropriate.
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
> On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 07:12 -0500, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>> Something about this whole error-handling proposal confuses me.
>> Here's my concern: I can see 3 approaches, all having to do with what
>> goes in the 'b slot in the ('a,'b) status type:
>>     1. Use different, wholly incompatible types in 'b.  This allows
>>        you to put useful information into the signature of each
>>        error-producing function, but basically requires individual
>>        handling of each error.  No monadic magic and no conversion to
>>        exceptions is possible, and each error must be handled
>>        individually.  It's more explicit and more verbose.
>>     2. Use the same type in 'b everywhere.  There's no extra
>>        explicitness here, and I don't actually see any advantage over
>>        just using exceptions.
>>     3. Use different but compatible types, e.g., polymorphic
>>        variants.  Then you get both explicitness and the chance to
>>        use monadic or other tricks to join together the errors at the
>>        type level.  That has some clear advantages (the type system
>>        can infer for you the ser of all possible error messages), but
>>        we've found it leads to some sticky type error messages in
>>        some cases.
>> So, I understand why someone would try (1) or (3), but (2) seems
>> utterly pointless to me.  The proposal seems to be aiming at (1), but
>> then there's all this talk of monads which doesn't seem to fit (1).
>>
>> Am I missing something?
>>
>> y
> -- 
> David Teller
> Security of Distributed Systems
>  http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller
> Angry researcher: French Universities need reforms, but the LRU act  
> brings liquidations.
>